Time Travel is a bit like trying to cheat death. Not in the sense of achieving immortality, as aging of the body still occurs in most representations of the concept of journeying either backwards or forwards in time, with awareness of originating in another day and age. No, it’s about making life fun again, once you have discovered to which end living leads. Time Travel is about cheating death out of your fear of dying – assuming Death is a character of sorts with personal interests vested in the respectful and orderly departure of all life, which may be wrong in a silly kind of way, but nonetheless…
When you dream of Time Travel, you dream of experiencing sensations and witnessing events beyond the scope of your ordinary life expectancy, and seeing with your own eyes the events of history – in the making. It’s no less vivid to your inner vision than is traveling to another star system faster than light (also a kind of time machine, by the way), or hitting three consecutive home runs, or winning the lottery or finding the perfect partner. It’s dream quality vision – only for one reason:
As we determine the parameters of Time Travel today, 2012, Time Travel is not possible. Or, rather – if it would be, it would only be ”forward in time”, faster than our present pace through life and then only by comparison with the local time of those, we leave behind. The really cool stuff of jumping from time period to time period makes no real sense to any scientist. Maybe one day – but as of now the experience-a-dated-travel-brochure-for-your-self is out of the question… and therefore triple interesting.
Ever had things be out of reach, and either of your parents will just chose the moment to know it all? The moment you have them towed from your room, you immediately resume breaking down all known theory about Time Travel, the so called resulting paradoxes, alternate timelines, dimensions, spatial positioning, galactic coordinates… just to get a grip. And whilst still under the influence of parental death lock, you find it hard to get back to dreaming, but once you have exercised their stifling influence from your system, there it is again: The urge to see and experience the impossible future, the impossible past. And you vow to never bend to consolance of those infused with stark reality – that time travel may be possible, if only we re-define the term to fit the science…
No Way, José! Right? We want the whole packet – watch from a hilltop as Rome burns, travel with Hannibal’s army across snow covered alps, try to look aryan at one of the National Socialistiche Partei’s rallies, peak from the shadows, as Ann Boleyn fights to soften Henry VIIIs intent at her death out of childish boredom and annoyance, watch Marilyn’s dress blow up again and again, tour the events that define us, AND we want the stars, and the technology and the culture and the art and maybe the habits of humans having learned from our mistakes and pleasures, not just our children, but adults in their own age doing everything strangly their way.
We want what’s different and unobtainably so – many call it.
And one day we will have it. Or rather: THEY will have it, the people of the future, and I will have to settle for the off-chance of bumping into one of them, before I croak. Maybe even be offered a ride to another time, maybe escaping discovery to live another life in another time, but… there is nothing but assisting the meme of Time Travel on it’s daily rounds. One day it will have acquired enough momentum, and we won’t be needing to find something else to dream about. Something more realistic… ha! What else is daylight dreaming about?!
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